City of Palo Alto, CA
City of Palo Alto's outage record
City of Palo Alto customers in California rarely lose power at all: 0.6 interruptions last year, adding up to just 68 minutes without electricity over the whole year. That is 80% less outage time than the California state average of 5.8 hours a year.
What a typical outage at City of Palo Alto looks like
Outages here typically run short, about 1.8 hours before power is back - a battery power station or small portable generator should cover the essentials through most of them. Why outage length, not count, picks the backup: how often vs how long.
The generator question for City of Palo Alto
Most City of Palo Alto customers keep power almost all year. Serving 30,190 customers here, You probably do not need a generator unless you already have another reason to want one.
The source behind this number
City of Palo Alto filed these numbers itself, as a municipally-owned utility, under EIA Form 861 - a federal reliability report covering its entire California territory, serving 30,190 customers here, not a single street or outage. See California as a whole, across every utility that filed: California's outage record. How the verdict bands are set is in the methodology.